I love to shop. How about you? If it weren’t for all the helpful scolding I received as a child, and the warnings about Satan getting box seats in my soul, I might have grown up as a shoppaholic.

But then I came to Japan.

“Japan” as you know, means loosely, in Queen’s English, “to shop.” As the days passed here in the land of the rising sun and the massive tectonic plate shift, I found myself more and more possessed, by the urge to buy. Stuff. Things. Anything.

I bought cute cartoon character cuddly dolls. I bought Hello Kitty and Doraemon The Robot Cat icons to attach to my mobular telephone machine. I bought t-shirts with zany Japanese English on them. I bought stacks of Japanese pop music CDs. I bought English books at three times the price of what the writers were paid to write them. I bought Japanese re-issues of 1970’s out-of-print American album releases. I forgot to buy food. I grew thin.

I tooled from mammoth department store to mammoth department store, in search of unbought goodies. The slender Information Ladies and Elevator Ladies tipped their pink Princess Diana hats to me in silent recognition.
But still, occasionally I had bouts of sanity. At one point, while shelling out a good 10,000 yen (100 dollars) for some funky stationery I didn’t need, I looked over my shoulder around the endless shopping mall corridors, elevators, runways, and over the fellow frantic faces of billions of other shopping addicts. My eyeballs stuck briefly on all the mountains of bounty heaped in every corner of the frame: Who buys all this crud!?, I marveled.

Us, I realized. We do.

I had almost made up my mind to leave the beautiful islands, when I discovered Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is an independent country, located within Japan, operating officially under the title of “discount department store.” In the country of Don Quxiote one can buy…all the crud you didn’t buy before…because…it was too expensive. I was hooked.

While selling brand spanking new brand name goods, Senor Don also sells used stuff. While once taboo in Japan, hot young hot things are snapping up designer handbags like they’re on sale. In Japan, every hot young hot thing must have at least five top designer handbags, cigarette package cases, mobular telephone machine holders, belts, beltbuckles, beltbuckle holders, etcetera. As many hot young etc etcs work in low paying jobs, and these glorious designer items cost a pretty penny, the young are largely forced, forced! to mortgage their souls to Satan.

Inside the steamy sanctuary of the Don I had a revelation – I couldn’t make the leap to join this valiant young trend-setting army. Even at..discount prices.. I just didn’t have the money. I won’t lie - I’m a blogger, and I think that as such, I’m stripped of my lying privileges. I wanted those handbags. All of them.

But as it turned out, it was all for the good. For any righteous man could see that as bright and shiny as those handbags appeared, if you turned them upside down and shook ‘em out, they were in fact, empty. Good thing I checked.